Getting Found and Driving Traffic to Your FrontPage-based Web Site

Getting Found and Driving Traffic to Your FrontPage-based Web Site

Published: April 2002

Overview

There are millions and millions of pages on the Web, but how do you make sure potential customers will find your Microsoft® FrontPage®-based Web site? Promote it. Many options are available from improving how your site is found by search engines to online and offline advertising. What follows are tried and true ways of getting found on the Internet and driving customers to your business Web site.

Getting Found

Search Engines and Tag Magic

One way many potential customers get to your site is through searches on sites like Yahoo, Google or one of the other Internet portal sites. You can get your Web site found more easily by registering your Web site with those search engines, while usually there is a fee involved, it can be money well spent. But first before registering with search engines, there is alot you can do on your Web site so that all search engines have a better chance of finding you. In fact, most search engines can do a pretty good job of finding your site on the Web, if it contains the right information in the form search engines look for.

Search engines typically read information contained in the <HEAD> section of each HTML page you have on your Web site. You can tell a search engine exactly what kind of information is on your site or in a particular page on your site and dramatically increase the likelihood that somebody searching for your goods and services will find you. Here is where a little Tag magic can cost-effectively make a big difference. Below is a brief listing and description what some of these tags can do for you-

<TITLE> Tag

The title tag creates the title you give each page on your Web site. The title tag for a page displays the title specified in the top of the browser when that page is open. However, search engines also use the title tag as a pointer to your search engine listing.

<META Tags That Say Who You Are

There are two types of content meta-tags you can use on each page of your Web site. Search engines look at content meta-tags to determine what descriptions and key words to associate with your Web pages. Meta tags may not be weighted as heavily as the title tag or the text on your pages, but they are still important. The first meta tag should be the meta description tag used to display a descriptive phrase for what your Web page is about in the search engine’s results. This can help potential customers select your Web site from among a number of similar ones, so give your description phrase a lot of thought.

The second content meta tag is the meta keyword tag providing the search engines with key words or key phrases you want to have your page associated with. Words entered in the KEYWORD section help potential visitors who are looking for specific information track your site down and they also can be used for intranet document identification. Try to make it a list of highly focused key words and use two or three word phrases wherever possible because they tend to create better search results. Finally, two things to keep in mind, not all search engines use the meta keyword in their search criteria, but those that do usually rank sites on relevance, so sites with a particular keyword repeated more times will be considered more relevant.

Additional Helpful <META Tags

There are additional meta tags that are used to help search engines find and update their indexing of your site. For example, the Robots META tag gives instructions to search engines that index your site. The “INDEX” value tells them to index the specific page, but do not follow any of the page’s links which may decrease the accuracy of their search results. On the other hand, the Revisit META tag tells search engines when they should revisit your Web document to update their index. The copyright and author META tags are self-explanatory (see example).

Below is an example of what all these tags look like in the HTML header section of a Web page.

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<HTML>
<HEAD>

<TITLE>page title</TITLE>
</HEAD>

Driving Traffic to Your FrontPage-based Web Site

Now that you know how to have search engines find your Web site with more accuracy and efficiency, it’s time to take a brief look at other ways to generate more traffic. Here is a short list of things you can do-

· Include your Web site address in all your other marketing efforts such as brochures or ads in print, on radio, and television.

· Use news releases to promote your Web site by notifying appropriate media that your business is online so they can pass it on to their readers.

· Announce your site in online discussion and news groups, but only if your site relates directly to that topic of discussion.

· List your products or services at online malls or product directories.

· Link to online news stories or articles about your business, if they are available.

· Join online affiliate programs, possibly with your suppliers and distributors.

· Develop reciprocal links with companies that offer complementary products or services.

You can also attract new customers with no cost advertising by joining the Web's largest banner network, the Microsoft bCentral™ Banner Network, and advertise online. The bCentral Banner Network is a cooperative model in that for every 2 ads you display on your site, you earn a credit toward displaying your banner on another member's site. The amount of free advertising you receive is directly proportional to the amount you give others.

And you can access the Banner Network from within FrontPage 2002 by selecting the Insert menu and then click Web Component, select bCentral Components, and in the right pane, double-click bCentral Banner Ad. Or learn more about the Banner Network by visiting the bCentral Web site at:

http://adnetwork.bcentral.com/

Summary

Many options are available from improving how your business Web site is found on the Internet from search engines to online and offline advertising. By getting found and driving more traffic to your site, hopefully you will increase your sales and grow your business.

More Information

http://www.microsoft.com/Frontpage/ for information and resources on Microsoft FrontPage version 2002.

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